Cloud Computing Expo 2010 – New York City

Three full days of presentations with 07:30 starts and 19:00 finishes flew in surprisingly fast. Whether I was hearing about a new technology solution or a new business model based on private, public or hybrid clouds, it was all interesting. There are a lot of companies like The Server Labs, looking to grow with the cloud and a lot of IT people like you wondering what the cloud is and how they can put it to good use. The vendors made a decent job of educating the audience while explaining their point of view and ultimately pitching their products. At least they weren’t listing features and giving demos during the presentations, you had to go to the expo floor for that and the iPad raffles of course.

Around 70 vendors, large and small came from all over with solutions ranging from public and private clouds to security, monitoring and virtualization management software. It’s obvious that no one vendor has a complete soup to nuts cloud solution to fit every situation and that you have a lot of work to do just to understand what you need. The good news is that system integrators (like us) that are ahead of the curve are in a position to help you cut through the haze and get straight to the set of technologies that is right for your specific situation.

There is still an enormous amount of confusion over what exactly “The Cloud” is and this will continue for the foreseeable future. What is clear is that a handful of early adopters are reaping huge benefits because they had a specific use case that was perfect for the cloud and they took the risk to capitalise on it.